Various Authors—American Indians & disease: This was originally under my comments to Craig Neumier, but I realized that several other people have commented on the issue over the last several months, so I decided to move it up here.

First, extremely high estimates of American Indian population loss entirely from disease are too high unless there was some special factor that made Indians more vulnerable than most other populations. My general impression is that as long as an Indian group kept some degree of autonomy and some degree of buffer space between themselves and Europeans, they tended to lose between 60 and 75 percent of their population to disease. That’s with a European settlement close enough to record the process. That’s bad enough, but it isn’t 90 percent and it doesn’t in and of itself destroy the culture—not unless it is totally dependent on specialists in order to function. Now those figures do not apply to areas where malaria and yellow fever became endemic. Indian cultures in those areas tended not to make it. On top of all of the other diseases, those two were just too much. They also don’t apply when groups lost their land and/or were massacred by Europeans or other Indians. I suspect that even getting as low as 25 to 40 percent took some special vulnerabilities. I’ll look at what those vulnerabilities might have been in a minute. First though, I’ll attempt to prove that there would have to be some special factors.

Step one: Individual diseases, even smallpox, don’t normally do the kind of damage claimed (50 to 90 percent) on a continent-wide basis.

• Consider this: Smallpox didn’t become endemic in Europe until the late Middle Ages. It had visited before, but rarely. Immunity to smallpox is not inherited. It doesn’t even last a lifetime. If part of Europe went fifty years between epidemics, then no one in that area would be immune. It would be a virgin soil disease. If smallpox routinely kills 90 or even 50 percent of a population where no one is immune on a continent-wide basis, then Europe should have suffered multiple episodes of smallpox that killed 50 to 90 percent of the population in the Middle Ages. There may well have been local epidemics that killed that percent of the population in a particular city or province or island, but I don’t recall anything on that kind of scale on a continent-wide basis.
• Individual European colonies went decades between smallpox epidemics. New England had effective quarantine measures which kept smallpox out for twenty or thirty years ending in the late 1670’s. An entire generation of New England children grew up without exposure to smallpox. Did smallpox kill 50 or 90 percent of them when it returned in the late 1670’s? No. It killed several hundred—maybe a thousand at most out of New England’s 40,000+ people.

So, if Indians lost 50 or 90 percent of their population to smallpox alone, it wasn’t just because it struck a population where no one was immune to it. Something else had to be going on. More likely, those figures, and especially the 90 percent one, apply only to some individual groups who were extremely unlucky or susceptible. The Mexipop study I talked about a couple of issues ago rates smallpox as capable of killing 50 percent of a previously non-immune population on a local basis. I’d say that’s about right, unless special circumstances are involved like smallpox hitting a malnourished population or causing a famine by hitting at planting or harvesting season. That study didn’t rate any of the other diseases that it looked at as being as lethal as smallpox. (Of course, I don’t believe it looked at malaria and yellow fever because they didn’t impact the study area)

Step two: The whole panoply of diseases didn’t strike any one Indian group all at once. In the Mexican Indian example, they got hit by maybe half-a-dozen to a dozen different diseases over a period of 80 years. That’s with Spaniards living in their midst and with constant trade back and forth with Europe. Without Spanish conquest, those diseases would have hit over a more extended period of time, giving populations more time to recover between epidemics. It seems to follow that it would have taken longer for the populations to hit their low point, and probably more individuals would die, but that low point would have been a considerably higher number than in our time-line.

So, if it took special factors to get Indian populations as low as they got, what were those factors? Some possible ones:

• Were European immune systems just better at fighting crowd type diseases in general due to natural selection? In this view, Europeans were the survivors of a long process where the most vulnerable people in a population didn’t have off-spring. Indians didn’t have that background and were more susceptible to a variety of diseases. That may have played a role, but if there was some kind of general immune system efficiency involved, why did Europeans die off in such huge numbers when exposed to African diseases? Were African immune systems even tougher than European ones? If general immune system toughness was a major factor, then people of African origin should have survived in significantly greater numbers than Europeans when exposed for the first time to an African disease environment. That was not the case with African American slaves sent to Liberia. They died off at a slightly lower rate than Europeans, but I seem to recall that they were less than ten percentage points away from the European death rate. That could easily be accounted for by the known genetic adaptations to malaria. Bottom line: if there was a difference in how well immune systems worked between populations, it probably didn’t make a whole lot of difference. Exposure to something lethal that an immune system hasn’t encountered before is still lethal.
• Were Europeans genetically adapted to survive specific diseases more effectively? Almost undoubtedly, at least by 1492. Some southern European populations have genetic diseases that also help them cope with malaria more effectively. Is there some genetic element that makes populations less susceptible to smallpox? The only hint I’ve seen of that is a brief mention somewhere (I can’t find the source again for the life of me) that smallpox appears to select for "B" blood-types. That would be bad for American Indians because most of them have "O" blood-types if I recall correctly. There are some exceptions to that. I believe that the Apaches and Navaho have predominantly AB blood-types. That might be significant in that the Navaho managed to grow from a little tribe of 4000 or so to over 100,000 people at a time when most tribes got smaller. If this is all true, then it has some interesting AH implications: The Apaches apparently once ruled most of the Great Plains(in the 1500’s and most of the 1600’s), but lost out when their enemies got access to guns first. What if the various Apache tribes won out in the inter-Indian struggles for the Great Plains? If they really were less susceptible to smallpox, and if their population started growing to match the new resources that horses gave them, they could get formidable. Eventually population pressure starts pushing them out toward the east and west. By the time the frontier arrives, most of the western two-thirds of the United States is occupied by Indian tribes capable of population growth under the impact of European diseases. Implications? I suspect we’d still win, but fighting two or three hundred thousand Apaches would not be an easy thing. The handful that we did have to fight gave us fits. It might lead to a more militarized US, or a more racially polarized one between Indians and others.
• Were Indians vulnerable because they were more closely related than most other populations? Some genetic studies seem to say that a population of Indians is generally more closely related to one another than a comparable group of Europeans, Asians or Africans, probably because they are descended from relatively small populations that managed to traverse the Bering straits.. One author suggests that may make it easier for diseases to really hammer Indians. Supposedly, the strain adapts to a particular body, then is able to overwhelm very similar bodies more easily. There may well be an element of truth to this one, though as I’ll show in a little bit, there are upper limits to how virulent something like smallpox or measles will get. This variable susceptibility to disease has AH implications. If humanity really did go through a volcano-induced population bottleneck 70,000-odd years ago, as several people have theorized, then this could mean that we as a species are unusually susceptible to diseases because we are less genetically diverse than say chimpanzees. Of course, we weren’t the only species affected by that bottleneck. Probably every other large species in Africa and Asia would be similarly impacted. Something like rabbits in Australia, which descended from a small group of ancestors, would have similar problems. We may have a skewed view of how much of a problem diseases are because of that bottleneck. An AH that eliminates the bottleneck might give us less disease-susceptible populations, which might accelerate the process of urbanization, but mean that urban populations have a smaller disease advantage over than less urbanized ones. There is also the possibility that the bottleneck at 70,000-odd years ago caused one or more human diseases or diseases capable of jumping to humanity to go extinct. If humanity was in Asia a million or two years before the bottleneck happened, that would be long enough for the Asian branch of humanity to develop it’s own suite of diseases, which would probably help keep the other branches of humanity out. Asia also had at least three great apes which became extinct in the last couple hundred thousand years. The bottleneck that killed off most of humanity may have exterminated them, which would also reduce the potential reservoir of diseases from Asia we might otherwise have been susceptible to. That leads to a couple of story ideas: cross-time travelers run into and/or bring back some Asian nasties from a dimension where the bottleneck was less severe, or someone tries to recover DNA and resurrect the Asian subspecies of humanity, but ends up resurrecting a superbug. Hopefully anyone with enough skill to recreate DNA would know enough not to do that. Oh well.
• Were Indians more susceptible to disease than Europeans because of their diet? There are some hints of that. Corn, beans, and squash worked as a diet as long as it could be supplemented by wild game, and as long as the population wasn’t heavily stressed. There is evidence that Mississippian women tended to be borderline malnourished during pregnancy and until the child was weaned. As populations grew, game animals got scarce, and the agricultural products were barely nutritious enough to keep people healthy without stresses. Would someone under nutritional stress be more vulnerable to disease? Probably. The Aztecs and other MesoAmerican groups had a more varied diet than most Mississippians, but the Spanish tended to reduce the quality of that diet, partly because some grains were associated with Aztec cannibalism. A diet that kept people alive but malnourished in the short term would certainly make them more than normally susceptible to diseases. This also has AH implications. If European food animals spread before European diseases, then populations might become less susceptible to those diseases, both because they are less malnourished and because those animals represent a food reserve which can be eaten if disease causes a harvest to be lost.

As I mentioned earlier, there are some hints that there is an upper limit to how virulent a disease like smallpox or measles that either kills you or gets pushed out of your system can get. That probably limits the influence of most of those variables. If a disease strain gets too deadly, it kills off its hosts before it finds new ones. That means that diseases tend to develop more deadly strains when they go through a closely packed population with good transportation networks where nobody is immune. Those strains tend to die out and be replaced with less deadly ones when most of a population is immune, or when a population is sparse and communications move slowly. One author suggests that the Incas didn’t get hit as hard by disease as the Aztecs did because their transportation system was linear—like spokes in a wheel, rather than a series of concentric circles like the Aztec one.

There is very strong evidence that smallpox increased or decreased its virulence according to how much of the population was immune. Once immunization caught on, a comparatively mild strain of smallpox called Variola minor became predominant, taking over from the more deadly Variola major. The Aztecs and other Meso-American Indians probably got smallpox at about its most deadly when it went through the first time. From what I’ve read, it sounds as though the strain came from West Africa, where smallpox was not yet endemic, so it would have gotten very deadly before it started across the ocean. It would have sustained itself through a chain of infection on a slave ship, then gone through another non-immune population of Indians on the West Indies islands, honing it to be about as deadly as it could be. It then went through the thickly populated areas of Meso-America at a very deadly level. As it reached the fringes of Meso-America, natural selection would probably tend to make the strains that kept going less deadly. Less deadly strains would have a better chance of making it past areas with low population density. By the time smallpox hit the Incas, chances are that it would have developed into less deadly strains. The large, non-immune populations of Peru would have let it develop more deadly strains again, at least to some extent, but that would take some time.

If this is all true, then there are all kinds of variables you can play with. Smallpox directly from Europe would be less deadly than smallpox from Africa, because it would have had to survive in an environment where most people were immune. There would also probably be natural selection within European strains. The more deadly the strain, the more likely it would be to run out of hosts on the boat over here. So smallpox directly from Europe to Mexico would probably tend to kill a lot few Indians than the epidemic they actually had. If there were 16 million Mexican Indians before the first epidemic, then a difference of ten percent in how deadly the smallpox was works out to 1.6 million more Indians to face subsequent problems.

The more deeply you think about disease and American Indians, the more complex the issues appear. Some of the dynamics tend to work in subtle and often counter-intuitive ways. Sometimes you get a trade-off. For example, my scenario where Spain settles the American southeast earlier and more extensively (last POD), would probably lead to Indian populations dropping sooner and more rapidly than in our time-line. They would also start to recover sooner though. I think that means that traditional cultures would be even more disrupted than in our time-line, but in the long term there would probably be more ethnic Indians, and the resulting cultures would probably be in some ways tougher. On the other hand, they might actually become more dependent on European technology because the narrower population bottleneck that they went through would allow less of their own technology to survive, and thus they would be likely to seek out European substitutes for more of the missing items.

Robert Alley: Your comments to me: I have to disagree with several comments on the impact of a ‘longer Russo-Japanese War’. First, at least some Europeans were quite aware that this was the first war between relatively modern great power armies in a long time, and were very interested in observing it. As a matter of fact, I believe that the exchange you mention between a German and a Japanese involved the German trying to get close enough to ‘learn the lessons of the war’ and the Japanese saying something on the order of ‘we’re earning first right to those lessons by Japanese blood.’ Would the Europeans have partitioned a Russia which fell into chaos after losing a long war, or would they have just nibbled at the edges? Well, I suspect that initially they would follow the pattern of what happened when Russia fell apart toward the end of World War I—taking large nibbles at the edges.

Germany and Austria-Hungary might grab essentially the territory that they grabbed in 1917 and 1918. England would probably try to set up more quasi-independent buffer states in Central Asia. Turkey would probably try to regain some territory in the Caucasus if the risks seemed low enough. Japan would increase its territorial ambitions, and even China might try to grab some disputed areas if Russia seemed weak enough. What happened after that would depend on how the Russians reacted. If they put together a strong government, the Colonial powers would probably leave the remaining territory alone. If they continued to descend into chaos, the nibbles would probably get bigger. If a regime that the colonial powers considered threatening took over—something like the Bolsheviks—then you might see a result like the European response to the Boxer rebellion. I could see a multi-national expedition to destroy such a regime, followed by the Europeans carving Russia up into "spheres of influence" which they would dominate economically, while leaving the government or governments relatively intact.

On an earlier end to the Roman empire: I’m assuming that at least in some cases rival governments keep each other honest. There are several reasons for that.

• First, there is kind of a natural selection type of a thing. If a regime gets too corrupt or inept or oppressive, then its rival snarf it up. Multiple competing governments can hone each other’s militaries. I see the problem of the later Roman empire as being that it had no truly threatening rivals, which allowed it to become weak enough that the barbarians could take on that role. The point of this scenario is that rival "Roman" governments could play the same role. That might or might not actually happen. It apparently didn’t in Spanish South America, though things might have gotten even worse in the absence of competition.
• No one government can suppress exploration or technical advances. With one Roman government, an emperor could say "steam engines are forbidden" and make it stick. With four or five emperors, that would be more difficult. Remember Columbus and his visits to the various courts of Europe? What if there had been only one court of Europe and the Queen had said "no" to his voyage? A Roman emperor could just say no to gunpowder if some inventor had come up with it. Four or five emperors probably couldn’t.
• With no serious rivals, a government is more likely to attempt to reduce the military potential of its own people. That’s suicidal if you have serious enemies, but it is probably a good move in the short term if you don’t. It reduces the possibility of internal revolts and thus allows a government to become more oppressive and corrupt, which unfortunately some Emperors are going to see as a good thing.

I do agree that multiple small empires would make for a very different Christian church.

On an early breakup of the US: I doubt that it would take anything all that elaborate to make that happen. The Brits were pretty inept politically through most of the war, and after they figured out that they were going to lose the 13 colonies they actually preferred that all the territory they were going to lose stay a part of what they considered a weak state as opposed to part of it getting snapped up by likes of Spain or France. If they had tried, they could have probably gotten the colonies at each others’ throats by offering various ones separate treaties with generous access to the western territories. Also, as I mentioned earlier, a US conquest of Canada somewhere along the line might ironically have led to a breakup by removing the main potential rival. The British presence in Canada kept the US on its toes until at least the 1840’s. I think that one of the early American invasions of Canada (led by Benedict Arnold I believe) was scuttled at least partly by a smallpox epidemic. Get rid of that, and who knows? Benedict Arnold conquers Canada, becomes THE hero of the American revolution, and things go downhill from there?

On "the unfought battle." France had a couple of problems here. First, they didn’t have a lot of room for maneuver because they were unwilling to violate Belgian and Dutch neutrality. It only made sense to attack Germany seriously if Germany was fully involved with Poland and would have to remain involved for quite some time. By the time France was mobilized and ready to attack it was obvious that Poland wasn’t long for the war. That being the case, it didn’t make much sense to push into Germany with France’s mobile forces and have Germany switch their forces around and sweep through Belgium to cut those forces off. Now Germany wasn’t really in a position to do that. The war with Poland was short but hard-fought, and left the Germans with a lot of tanks, aircraft, and trucks in need of repair. The French didn’t know that it would take the Germans three months to rebuild to the point of going on the offensive again after the Polish campaign.

Second, it did take France a while to mobilize. Gamelin, the top French general, claimed after the war that only one-third of the French army was mobilized by September 12, 1939. Mobilization was close to done by September 25, 1939. Was that an inordinately long time? The French started calling up a few reservists on August 21, 1939, but they didn’t go for a full mobilization until September 1, 1939. That means it took them essentially 3 to 4 weeks. I don’t know how that compares to Germany. I suspect that it was a little slower—but only by maybe a week or so. It takes a while to move millions of men out of civilian life and get them organized into their units. Poland, with a poor transportation system, would have taken two to three months to complete mobilization. The real problem was that the allies let the Germans get a major jump on mobilization—they were essentially done before the allies decided to go for full mobilization. The political leaders of France and England didn’t want to repeat the mistakes of World War I where mobilization made it very difficult to get off the slide toward war.

To a certain extent, the start of World War II showed what the great powers were afraid of in 1914—if one power gets a major jump on mobilization, then that power has a window where they are enormously stronger than normal compared to their adversaries. As I mentioned, at the beginning of World War II the allies let Germany get very close to full mobilization before they started to mobilize. Poland paid the price of that caution. The Poles started to mobilize quite some time before the war started, but the French and English put heavy pressure on them not to go beyond a certain point. As a result, about one-third of the Polish army never got mobilized before the country was overrun. An even smaller percent of it was actually in place when the Germans attacked. I seem to recall that it was under one-half, though it’s been a while since I saw the figures.

The allied delay in mobilization was what made the easy German victory over Poland possible. Without it, the Germans wouldn’t have dared to put as huge a percentage of their power against Poland. They would have faced Polish armies that were much stronger initially, which would have probably meant slower progress, which in turn would have given the Poles time to get closer to full mobilization

Yes, I really do have a scenario where New Guinea takes over the world (well sort of). It’s on my website. The basic idea is that one of the big New Guinea marsupial herbivores survives long enough to be available for domestication when agriculture gets started in New Guinea nine or ten thousand years ago. That source of protein gives New Guinea agriculturalists a larger advantage over hunter-gatherers, and causes it to go expansionistic early. Eventually it reaches the coast, then expands to nearby islands, and then starts doing an expansion into the Pacific ala the Polynesians, but several thousand years earlier. That expansion takes them to the Americas while most of the Americas are still at the hunter-gatherer stage, and the New Guinea culture lodges in parts of South America. The two cultures start cross-breeding through a slow diffusion of innovations across the Pacific. Voyagers from New Guinea settle as far afield as Madagascar, just as relatives of the Polynesians did. They even get as far as South Africa. That’s just a basic outline. If you want the full scenario, go to:

http://members.aol.com/dalecoz/dale2.htm

then follow the links.

I can’t comment intelligently on your two middle ages editor’s divergences. I’m weak on that period of history. I did enjoy your attempt at the Europe 1945 scenario. As you probably noticed, I interpreted it to mean a more violent conflict sooner than you did, but your interpretation is reasonable. I suspect that if the Soviets attacked in 1945, the US would not rest until the Soviet regime was destroyed totally. That’s the way I played it. We weren’t in a mood to tolerate aggressive totalitarians. On the other hand we were in the mood to have the war be over. Your solution is certainly a possibility. It depends on public opinion, which is notoriously hard to gauge.

Jim Bante: Thanks for the reviews. I’ll have to look up Victory in Vietnam. Sounds like fun. I wonder how the Chinese would have reacted to such a scenario. They might have intervened. On the other hand they might have just decided that they were dealing with a nuclear-armed nutcase and it would be better to just back off for a while. I wonder how Goldwater would have affected the space program.

Dale Cozort: In spite of my uber-table of contents, I managed to make finding parts of my contribution difficult. The short story Freedom apparently didn’t appear on some tables of contents, while part one of my short story The BEM’s did not appear on any of the table of contents and is very easy to overlook. Some issues went out with a hastily crossed out paragraph, the result of trying to add a section to an already printed off zine and getting the match-up wrong. If I’m going to have 50+ page zines, I need to make them extremely easy to navigate. This one was a little lacking in that regard. Also, speaking of The BEMs, I felt bad about leaving my damsel in that much distress. Let’s see, her mind has been stripped away, and is sitting in a little electronic box waiting to sent off to these "Bug-Eyed-Monsters". Her body is directed by the remnants of her mind, now operating at two-year-old level, and she’s surrounded by four or five guys who want to do her harm. And I leave her like that for at least two months, innocently asking if anyone wants to see what happens next. I promise to take another unused page this issue and at least get her out of that mess, then I’ll see how people feel about me putting the rest in at a later date.

I noticed one glaring typo: on the last page I meant to say close and said chose. Hopefully the meaning came through.

David Johnson: I enjoyed the book reviews, especially the one on Climb the Wind. I think that RAEBNC means Read And Enjoyed But No Comments, right?

Your comments to me: Yeah, if I manage to sell "Exchange, the novel" I’ll have a nice setup for some future stories about life on the "new frontier", with a lot of very antagonistic settlers. I’m sorry I didn’t give better references for Ice Age Surprise, not to mention Sardinian Surprise and the asteroid strike that I moved around last issue. I have a tendency to read something, copy it, then lose it in my overwhelmed filing system.

I’m trying to get better organized.

On convergent kangaroos from South America: That may not be as wild of an idea as you think, though it wasn’t what I had in mind. Marsupials have a problem developing fast-running four-legged animals. They are born at what would normally be an embryonic stage and crawl to their mother’s pouch, using the prematurely developed digits on their front paws to grab the fur and pull themselves along. That means that unless they develop fingers, then lose them later on, they can’t develop hooves like a horse or even relatively immobile toes that they stand on like a dog’s—at least not on the front feet. They can, however, do whatever they need to with their hind feet, because the hind feet aren’t involved in the initial climb to the pouch. There actually was a small (mouse/gerbil sized I think) hopping marsupial herbivore in South America as recently as the early Pleistocene. It apparently never got all that big, probably because South America had its own formidable collection of larger herbivores. (For you Cryptozoologists out there, the fossil record of this little guy is very spotty. It shows up abruptly, then vanishes just as abruptly. Could still be hiding out somewhere. South America is a big continent.)

By the way, the story of South America seems to have started out about the same way as Australia, with marsupials playing a very major role. Unlike Australia, South America experienced a continued trickle of animals from North America and possibly Africa that gradually reduced marsupials to a relatively minor role. What if monkeys hadn’t made it to South America? Rodents and monkeys got there late, and apparently by island-hopping. That’s always a matter of luck. What if one or both of those animals hadn’t gotten lucky? Marsupial monkeys? Marsupial rodents? There are fossils of marsupials that appear to have been headed in both of those direction. Before monkeys arrived, the monkey niches appear to have been divided between the ancestors of the tree sloths and a now extinct group of opossums. Rodent niches were divided between marsupials and small varieties of the now extinct South American ungulates. Say the island hopping doesn’t happen. Marsupials have an entire large, rich continent in which to develop in those niches. Do they develop into Marsupial equivalents of monkeys, and apes, and baboons? Could one of those marsupial apes start walking around upright and…naah, probably not. I’ll have to play with this one a little bit.

On Sardinian Surprise, you are assuming that the female has to be Neanderthal. I would guess that slave girls would be easier to acquire than female Neanderthals, and might work just as well, though I believe that with mules the sex of the respective parents does make a difference in the offspring. That’s kind of a revolting idea, but I’m assuming a very ruthless person here.

On Quarantine, I’m glad you enjoyed the scenario. I haven’t talked much about the beings behind the quarantine, or what they are doing in Europe, at least partly because I still haven’t worked that out entirely. Tentatively, I have them using technology (the boat zappers) initially, then resorting to lower tech solutions as their high tech toys break down. As the story fragment indicates, though probably rather confusingly, Europe has not been left to its own devices. The references to the "beast" and the "false sacrament" give some clues as to what is happening in Europe. In 1520, the high tech prevents contact between the West Indies and the mainland of North and South America. Three to four hundred years later it is no longer in a position to do so. I’m not trying to be mysterious here, but the framework for Europe and for the beings behind the quarantine are still very tentative. I have a lot of details to work out.

On the issue of disease and American Indians, I moved my comments to the top of the feedback section because I found myself repeating myself to various peaple.

On your TrolleyWorld story: I’m doing two reads. Read one is to just get the general feel of the story. I just finished that one. Based on that read, I like the story, but have a few problems. The story grabbed me. I like the characters. I wanted more, and was disappointed when it ended. I noticed a few problems with grammar. I’ll find those again later. I’m also not sure you need quite as long of a setup as you have. If the point of the plasma is just to open a ‘gate’, then you might want to cut back on it a little. On the other hand, it is a cool scenario. It got me into the story.

Read two is to be ultra-picky on grammar. I see a few minor glitches. Possible grammar problems:

• on page i: You may need a comma 2/3rds of the way down: "Time, 23:50." He recorded tiredly. "Going to 80%"
• on page ii: at top, "break through" should probably be "breakthrough".
• on page iii: middle "Has anyone been hurt," should be "Has anyone been hurt?"
• on page 4: near top: Awkward sentence: "Her having to now share the seat with two backpacks…"
• on page 10: near top: "Okay your right.." should be "Okay you’re right…"

My wife always delights in finding at least that many minor glitches in my stories after I think I’ve gotten the last one out, which is a little hard on the ego. I also find it useful though. I hope you do too.

Wesley Kawato: From what I’ve seen, POD is a remarkably flame-free environment. Issues get discussed, and argued over, sometimes passionately, but everyone has been remarkably good at sticking to the issues rather than personalities so far. (Though I do seem to butcher at least one person’s name in an unintentionally offensive way about every other issue.)

Craig Neumier: Interesting essay on the role of religion in development. I think people often overemphasize the military in both history and alternate history—seeing the battles and the strategies but not the technology and beliefs that drive those battles. It is good to see that counterbalanced this way.

I’m looking forward to the new Alternate Earths. Sounds like fun.

Your comments to me:

On Quarantine: The little portion of Quarantine that I present this issue should give you some hints about what is going on in Europe. I’ll expand on them as the story goes on (and as I fill in the details in my own mind). Yeah, you can’t just isolate Europe from the Americas and expect that to solve the entire problem. On the spelling of Huastecs, I think you are right. As you may have noticed, I am spelling impaired when it comes to names. The reason that I have bronze metallurgy becoming prominent for a while is that it is more accessible to Indian craftsmen than iron making. Iron making would not be entirely lost, though some of the nuances would be. It would become more prominent as time went on.

On American Indian disease: I wrote a large response here, then moved it to the top of the feedback section in order to consolidate responses to several people on the question.

On whether or not disease would be a culture-killer: Again, it really depends on what you focus on. For the sake of argument, let’s say something really deadly gets loose in the modern US. Overall it kills forty percent of the population, once you add in the extra impact of any famines and psychological damages and urban unrest. Then ten years later something else, or maybe the same thing gets loose and brings our population down to forty percent of its original value. Chances are that it would hit the big cities much harder than the rural and small town areas. Would that be a "culture-killer"? Certainly music, and art and film would be very hard hit. Some technical specialties would become very scarce, if not non-existent. Try finding a rocket scientist, or a nuclear engineer after that.

The political and economic structure of the country would change in reality though possibly not in theory. If New York and Washington DC were hit very hard, power would probably shift to the states. We would probably fill any gaps in Congress and the presidency, but the bureaucracies that give them the levers of power would not be easy to replace. If Washington survived almost unscathed, it would still have a problem. The rest of the country and the economy would not be as able or as willing to support the amount of government that current Washington represents. Chances are that the rest of the country wouldn’t need that level of government (assuming that it needs it now).

There would be a very dramatic decline in certain types of technology, and the resulting country would be a very different place than the one we are in. Would that mean that American culture was dead? A farmer in Idaho probably wouldn’t think so. An actor or playwright in New York might well think so. Who would be right? I don’t know. The bottom line is that the phrase "culture killer" is powerful sounding but subject to so many different interpretations and perspectives as to be essentially meaningless.

Jim Rittenhouse: Good to see you back with a very respectable bunch of comments. I sympathize on the lost file. There’s nothing more infuriating than writing a bunch of good stuff, then losing it to a computer glitch. On the issue of very large zines: I’m really trying to cut back to a more reasonable level, though the last two of my issues certainly haven’t reflected that. I’d like to keep my zines consistently at twenty-five to thirty pages. I suspect that when they get larger than that good stuff gets overlooked because it becomes such a chore to comment intelligently on it all.

Rich Rostrom: I’m afraid I have to say RAEBNC to your stuff. US history in the 1800’s is one of my weak spots.

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